Last year’s frightening flooding of the Mississippi River didn’t do any direct damage to the site of one of the pivotal battles of the Civil War. It did bring in some undesirable new neighbors.

Park officials say a pack of wild hogs seeking higher ground moved in and are rooting up the landscape at Vicksburg National Military Park, an 1,800-acre park where thousands of Union and Confederate troops fought and died in 1863.

They fear the hogs could undermine some of the park’s 1,370 monuments, its national cemetery and trenches and earthworks on the bluffs above the river. The hogs could also startle or injure more than 1 million annual visitors.

“It looks like the world’s biggest Rototiller has gone through some areas,” park Superintendent Mike Madell said. “People think we plowed some of the areas they’ve been in.”

Maybe they’re just trying to throw up earthworks:

“It’s an all-out war on them,” he [Jim Walker of the Mississippi Department of Wildlife Fisheries and Parks] said. “But hunting will never get rid of them. They can breed three times a year and a sow can have eight to 10 pigs each time. You do the math.”

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue…as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”